Caliph

The Prophet died in 632 without an arrangement that everyone accepted, and the disagreement about what should have happened next is the origin of the division between Sunni and Shia Islam. Every later dispute about religious authority in Islam refers back to it.

The Sunni account. The community chose. Abu Bakr was acclaimed at Saqifa, and Umar, Uthman and Ali followed by processes of consultation and acclamation that Sunnis regard as legitimate. The four are the Rightly Guided Caliphs, and the model they establish is that leadership of the community is a communal matter, settled by the qualified people of the community, and that the caliph is a political and executive successor with no prophetic or doctrinal function.

The Shia account. The Prophet designated Ali, most explicitly at Ghadir Khumm, and the community disregarded it. On this reading the first three caliphs were usurpers, and authority belonged by designation to Ali and after him to his descendants, who are Imams, not merely rulers, and whose authority is religious in a way no election could produce.

The two accounts cannot both be right and neither side has moved. What follows from them, though, is the more interesting difference: who gets to say what the religion requires. The Sunni answer distributes it, to the scholars, the schools of law, the consensus of the community, with the caliph enforcing rather than defining. The Shia answer concentrates it in the Imam and, in his absence, in the jurists who represent him.

The caliphate itself ran through the Umayyads, the Abbasids and eventually the Ottoman claim, and was abolished by the Turkish Grand National Assembly in March 1924. Restoration movements have followed ever since. The declaration of a caliphate by the Islamic State in 2014 was rejected by the overwhelming weight of Muslim scholarly opinion, on grounds including that the classical qualifications were absent and that the consent of the community, which every account of the office requires in some form, had not been sought and would not have been given.

After the four Rightly Guided Caliphs, the office became hereditary within ruling families rather than a matter of communal selection: the Umayyad dynasty, ruling from Damascus from 661, extended the caliphate's territory from Spain to Central Asia within a century, before the Abbasid dynasty overthrew it in 750 and moved the seat to Baghdad, presiding over the classical high point of Islamic scholarship and administration even as real political power increasingly passed to regional sultans who kept the caliph as a religious figurehead. A surviving Umayyad prince fled to Spain and founded a rival caliphate at Cordoba in 929, and the Shia Fatimid dynasty proclaimed its own rival caliphate in Cairo in 909, so for stretches of the tenth and eleventh centuries three men simultaneously claimed the title, each rejected as illegitimate by the others.

The Ottoman sultans claimed the caliphate from the early sixteenth century, a claim of uneven historical strength that nonetheless gave the office its final and most widely recognised form before Mustafa Kemal Ataturk's secularising Turkish republic abolished it outright in 1924. Restoration remains a live political goal for some Islamist movements, most of them, unlike the Islamic State, explicitly non-violent, such as Hizb ut-Tahrir, which campaigns for a restored caliphate through political and social organising rather than through armed conquest, illustrating that the aspiration to the office long outlived the office itself.